Gervonta Brown Davis vs. Isaac Jonathan Cruz González - the standalone IB RBR scorecard

Had Twink edging it the first time I saw it but when I watched it again the next day I had Cruz a winner. The best case scenario for Twink is a draw and that's with him stiff-arming, octopus grabbing and fouling the crap out of Cruz all night which obviously made things twice as difficult for the tiny little oompa loomp with the baby kangaroo reach and prevented him from being able to fight his fight and catch Twink with way more shots than he already did.

When I watched it the second time I couldn't believe how much of Twink's work was being blocked. Even many of the shots during the heavily biased pro Twink PBC highlight replays in between rounds were blocked and they were obviously supposed to be his best moments, whereas, conversely, Cruz landed the cleaner eye catching shots throughout.

 

Thanks for taking the time to do it, I had a feeling you'd come to the same conclusion.

While I've never been even remotely sold on Tank, the one thing he had going for him was his power. Not saying he's ever needed to be 100% bailed out by it at least up until recently against Barrios. He's been trending in that direction for quite some time. It should be abundantly clear to most that while still a damn good puncher, his power isn't as impressive at Lightweight as it was down at Super Feather. You could write off a subpar showing once, maybe twice, but then it becomes a pattern. He didn't make weight and looked poor against Fonseca at 130 and struggled to KO him clean, then the Gamboa match should've seen warning bells up big time, there's just no excuse why he needed a gift TKO against that version of Gamboa. The Barrios match, I predicted he'd give him nightmares due to his ranginess and he did for several rounds, but I did see Barrios eat a lot of clean shots and hurt by Cowboy Ryan Karl several times, so I knew he wasn't packing iron. Regardless, if that fight was being scored fairly, Barrios should've only been behind due to the knockdowns at the time of the stoppage. So all of the evidence which has been ample for anyone not wearing love goggles to see, that Tank ain't all that above 130. Hell, he was even being comprehensively dominated by a blown up Feather in LSC before the inevitable happened in his last outing at 130.

So, considering his power isn't amazing above 130, Cruz does well against southpaws, he destroyed Magdaleno far more easily than Lopez. I've never seen Cruz even remotely hurt and seems hard as ****ing nails, then based off of his showing against Mattice, where his high guard defense was tight, he can be a lot harder to hit clean than most people realized beforehand. Then add in, Davis doesn't like being pushed back at all, and tends to freeze up, like he did against LSC and Pedraza at times. It clicked to me right after they announced the fight, uh oh.... they done ****ed up.

Granted, having a long, good, almost photographic memory of most of the matches I've seen helps. Also, with us, actually seeing these guys fight before their big showings do as well.

I do the same even on live RBR's, I go into a tunnel vision zone and barely even notice the rest of the RBR. The only time I see something usually is after I hit post and whatever it is is directly above my most recent post. Those are the ones I respond to. Maybe if it's a slow uneventful match, like a Sunny Edwards or Bivol match, I'll click my notifications between rounds.